Collins Dictionary, based in London and Glasgow, got a head start on the WOTY competition in early November, selectingfake news over runners-up such as unicorn, echo chamber, and gig economy. (Related: My November 2016 post on fake.)

January 02, 2017

In debate strategy, there are assertions, counter-assertions, framing, reframing, rebuttals, and undermining. Then there’s the Gish Gallop, also known as “proof by verbosity,” “baffle them with bullshit,” or, latterly, the “Trump Tirade. “

This fallacious tactic seeks to drown an opponent “in a flood of individually weak arguments.” (In the case of Donald J. Trump, with outright lies.) The technique is named for Duane Gish (1921-2013), who managed, despite having earned a PhD in biochemistry from UC Berkeley, to define himself as a Young Earth creationist. (He was at one time the vice president of the Institute for Creation Research.) The American anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who was for many years the director of the National Center for Science Education, coined the term “Gish Gallop” in the 1990s to describe the “presentation of misconception after misconception” in public forums. (From 2011, here’s an example of a climate-science Gish Gallop.) Scott did not engage in unstructured public “debates” with creationists, preferring instead written debates that allow “the opportunity for documentation and references, impractical in oral debates.”

December 12, 2016

It’s fitting that elite emerged as one of the buzzwords of the 2016 presidential election, because elite is the French word for “selection” or “choice.” The word entered English in the late 14th century, when it signified “a chosen person,” especially a bishop-elect; it died out a few decades later and was re-introduced more successfully in Byron’s “Don Juan” (1823).:

At once the ‘lie’ and the ‘elite’ of crowds; Who pass like water filter’d in a tank, All purged and pious from their native clouds

In the poem, lie is pronounced lee, and meant “scummy remnant” (as in the lees at the bottom of a wine barrel).

September 12, 2016

Deplorables: Nounified, pluralized form of deplorable, an adjective meaning “lamentable, very sad, grievous, miserable, wretched” and usually used in reference to events, conditions, or circumstances. The adjective is derived from the Latin verb plorare, to weep or bewail.

The adjective deplorable first appeared in print in the early 1600s. The OED provides one citation for the plural noun deplorables: the journal of Sir Walter Scott, published in 1828: “An old fellow, mauld with rheumatism and other deplorables.” (Mauld is an alternate spelling of a regional usage of mauled that means “fatigued.”)

We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."

Clinton went on to describe “the other basket … of people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change.”

August 15, 2016

Sarcasm: A cutting remark intended to express contempt or ridicule. From late Greek sarkasmos: a sneer, jest, taunt, or mockery. Its original meaning was “tear flesh”; its root is sarco-, a Latinized form of a Greek root meaning “flesh.” Compare sarcophagus (limestone used for coffins; literally “flesh-eating”) and sarcoma (a fleshy tumor).

Sarcasm was defined and debated last week after the Republican presidential nominee – who had insisted multiple times at an August 10 rally in Florida, and in an August 11 radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, that President Obama is “the founder” of ISIS and Hillary Clinton the group’s “co-founder” or, alternately, “most valuable player” – shout-tweeted that the remarks were “sarcasm.”

Ratings challenged @CNN reports so seriously that I call President Obama (and Clinton) "the founder" of ISIS, & MVP. THEY DON'T GET SARCASM?

August 01, 2016

Apophasis: Saying something by denying that you’ll say it; the “I’m-not-saying-I’m-just saying” rhetorical device. From the Greek roots apo- (away from, off) and -phatikos (to speak): “to deny.” Entered English in a 1656 rhetoric text, when it was defined as “a kind of irony.” Pronounced (ə-pŏf′ə-sĭs). Apophasis is also known as praeteritio (“passing over”).

January 22, 2016

On Tuesday, Sarah Palin, wearing a hypnotically sparkly garment that sartorial conservatives might have impugned as inappropriate for a daytime event, delivered a 20-minute endorsement of real estate developer and former Democrat Donald J. Trump, who, as you may have heard, is running for president as a Republican in order to Make America Great Again. As the New York Timesput it, in an excess of understatement, “Ms. Palin has always been a singular force on the campaign trail. But in her her years away from politics, the former Alaska governor and Senator John McCain’s Republican vice-presidential pick in 2008 seems to have spawned a whole new series of idiosyncratic expressions and unusual locutions.”

I’ll say. Here are some of the responses Ms. Palin’s “expressions and locutions” have inspired.

November 17, 2014

Enallage: Substitution of one grammatical form for another that violates a grammatical rule. Pronounced almost exactly like analogy, but from a different Greek source, ἐναλλαγή, which means “change.” (Analogy can be traced back to ἀναλογία, which means mathematical proportion or correspondence.)

I learned enallage only recently, but it turns out I was very familiar with examples of it. Mark Forsyth (@InkyFool on Twitter) dropped the word into a recent New York Times column about the rhetoric behind successful slogans. Here’s the relevant passage:

The other day I told a friend I was writing an article on corporate slogans. He immediately told me that the one he hated, absolutely hated, was “Think different” because it should be “think differently.”

He’s right, grammatically. But the fact that he’s nursing a grudge over an ad slogan Apple hasn’t run for a dozen years proves just how memorable it was.

Same for a long-popular British slogan, “Beanz Meanz Heinz,” which grammar would have insisted on as “Beanz Mean Heinz.”

For that matter “Got milk?” is substandard speech. So is Subway’s “Eat fresh.” Probably the most memorable ad in Britain in the last few years uses the one-word tagline “Simples” — uttered by an anthroporphic Russian meerkat on behalf of an insurance website, comparethemarket.com.

It’s a trick called enallage: a slight deliberate grammatical mistake that makes a sentence stand out.

“We was robbed.” “Mistah Kurtz — he dead.” “Thunderbirds are go.” All of these stick in our minds because they’re just wrong — wrong enough to be right.

Forsyth—author of The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase—also discusses alliteration (“Famously Fresh” – Planters); diacope (“a verbal sandwich of two words or phrases with something else tucked in the middle,” as in the U.S. Army’s long-running “Be all you can be”); chiasmus (“I am stuck on Band-Aid*, ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me”); and tricolon (“Buy It. Sell It. Love It.” – eBay); and paradox (“The world’s local bank” – HSBC).

June 23, 2014

Whataboutism: A rhetorical defense that imputes hypocrisy to the accuser. Said to have been coined by western journalists and public officials to describe a Cold War-era tactic of their Soviet counterparts; popularized by writers at The Economist. Also known as the tu quoque fallacy (to quoque is Latin for “you, too”) or “the pot calling the kettle black.”

Behind the Iron Curtain, whataboutism was frequently summed up by the phrase “And you are lynching Negroes!”—the bleak punchline of a joke that circulated throughout the Soviet bloc. Here’s a 1962 version:

An American and a Soviet car salesman argue which country makes better cars. Finally, the American asks: “How many decades does it take an average Soviet man to earn enough money to buy a Soviet car?” After a thoughtful pause, the Soviet replies: “And you are lynching Negroes!”

Soviet propagandists during the cold war were trained in a tactic that their western interlocutors nicknamed “whataboutism”. Any criticism of the Soviet Union (Afghanistan, martial law in Poland, imprisonment of dissidents, censorship) was met with a “What about...” (apartheid South Africa, jailed trade-unionists, the Contras in Nicaragua, and so forth). … Whataboutism seemed to have died a natural death at the end of the cold war. But now it seems to be making a comeback.

I also found an early nonpolitical usage, in the 1990 book Educating the Intelligent Child, by UK-born Victor Serebriakoff (who was the grandson of Russian émigrés, which may or may not be relevant):

However, we have to beware of what I call ‘But-what-about?-ism’. There is an absurd concept of morality which says that no good thing shall be done for anyone unless it can be done for everyone.

There is a Northern Ireland neologism, ‘Whataboutery’, that is used to describe the bouts of accusation-slinging that characterize local politics. When a politician from one side charges the other side with some wrongdoing, the matter will rarely be discussed rationally. Instead it will be answered with a corresponding accusation: ‘What about such and such injustice?’ Whataboutery is symptomatic of the chasm in the interpretation of history that exists between the communities.

The earliest citation I found for whataboutery, from 2000, credits a BBC Ulster program, “Talk Back,” a daily current-affairs call-in show that launched in 1986, with the coinage.

Whataboutery turns up on Twitter, too, but rarely from so distinguished an author as this one:

Whataboutery: Don't let "X is bad" distract from "Y is appalling." But sometimes "Stop whining about X, look at appalling Y" is justified.

I was stumped, so I played for time by tweeting back that it may reflect the linguistic influence of Smile Train, the charitable organization, founded in 1999, that provides free cleft-lip and cleft-palate surgery for poor children in developing countries. It isn’t dentistry, but it’s definitely medicine, and “smile” in the name and tagline (“Changing the World One Smile at a Time”*) accentuates the solution rather than the unattractive handicap. I speculated that Smile Train’s visibility and success—it’s the largest “cleft charity” in the world—may have led to copycatting by other mouth-centric occupations.

“Smile” as a substitute for “teeth and gums” certainly is widespread, as a quick survey of current Living Social deals indicates.

This is different from “Imagine that you’re smiling,” and it’s very different from “Imagine yourself after the Novocaine finally wears off.” It’s an example of metonymy: a figure of speech in which a thing is called by something closely associated with the thing—“Hollywood” to mean “the film industry,” or “the White House” to mean “the executive branch of the U.S. government.”

Once I began thinking about dentists and “your smile” I remembered another example of oral metonymy I’d been noticing lately. This one comes from the world of cosmetics and beauty advice, where it seems you’re never fully dressed without a sulky, puffy-lipped pout.

The English-language copy talks about “a voluptuous, healthy-looking pout,” which is not just metonymic but also oxymoronic. But check out the French version. There’s a perfectly wonderful French word for pout, moue (pronounced “moo”), that’s also sometimes used in English. But the Marvelous Moxie copywriter didn’t use it. What do we see instead? “Un sourire voluptueux et resplendissant.” That’s right—a splendid, voluptuous smile.